I know partially about Shared preferences and intents.But i want to know what are shared preferences and content providers in android ? And also what is the basic difference between intents , shared preferences and content providers.
Please explain me this.
shared preferences are the location where you can store the secret information for your app, like setting cookies in the browser, this can be used for login credentials and other.
where as content provider stores and retrieves the data and make it available to other applications also. like suppose you want to access the contacts available in the android phone, they can be accessed by content providers
SharedPreferences
SharedPreferences is a key/value store where you can save a data under certain key. To read the data from the store you have to know the key of the data. This makes reading the data very easy. But as easy as it is to store a small amount of data as difficult it is to store and read large structured data as you need to define key for every single data, furthermore you cannot really search within the data except you have a certain concept for naming the keys.
Content providers
Content providers manage access to a structured set of data. They encapsulate the data, and provide mechanisms for defining data security. Content providers are the standard interface that connects data in one process with code running in another process.
You don't need to develop your own provider if you don't intend to share your data with other applications. However, you do need your own provider to provide custom search suggestions in your own application. You also need your own provider if you want to copy and paste complex data or files from your application to other applications.
Android itself includes content providers that manage data such as audio, video, images, and personal contact information.
Related
I want to share and receive data at some point from one application to another application, what's the best way to do?
I see content provider is used with database but I have only few strings to share to another applications. I have data stored in
SHARED PREFERENCES, which other application needs to access and vice-versa.
Please provide suggestions.
TIA.
I want to use sharedpreferences in my login form, but i also want keep XAMPP as my main storage. What is the best data storage when I want to do my app in offline mode?
Yes, you're allowed to mix and match any type of data storage you wish because none of them were designed to be in conflict with each other.
However, it's a good idea to understand what type of data storages is available for you to use, because different types of storages has different benefits and drawbacks.
SharedPreferences is a great way to store a user's preferences, or simple data with a single value. It's great for storing a user's preferences because when creating Settings, it's extremely common to use Preferences which directly reflects the values within your SharedPreferences. However, due to it's design, SharedPreferences isn't a good idea to store large amounts of data or dynamically created data.
For that, it's better to use a database and you're free to use any type of database you wish. But for offline mode, it's best to use the SQLite Database that's offered by Android by default.
However, if you do want to use XAMPP, it's not uncommon to see developers who store their full data in an online database, but cache a few data within a local database like SQlite.
Therefore, there's zero conflicts among data storage options, so mix and match to what benefits your app's design best.
If you want to store data in locally then you can use SQLite Database and yeah XAMPP is whole different thing to store data for this you need to create APIs to communicate with database.
You can also use Sharedpreferences for storing the data but Sharedpreferences will store data with the key-value pair only.
But you can use both for different different purposes for the same app
i'm beginner in android development, need help regarding ContentProvider.
public class My Application extends ContentProvider {}
A ContentProvider manages access to a structured set of data. It encapsulates the data and provide mechanisms for defining data security. ContentProvider is the standard interface that connects data in one process with code running in another process.
Kindly refer following links,
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/content-provider-creating.html
and
https://www.tutorialspoint.com/android/android_content_providers.htm
A content provider component supplies data from one application to others on request. one application cannot directly access (read/write) other application's data. Every application has its own id data directory and own protected memory area.
Content provider is the best way to share data across applications. Content provider is a set of data wrapped up in a custom API to read and write. Applications/Processes have to register themselves as a provider of data.
In simple language you can say content provider is a shared database which expose his properties and on there behalf of them other application can access and store the data as per the implementation privilege
Content providers can help an application manage access to data stored by itself, stored by other apps, and provide a way to share data with other apps. They encapsulate the data, and provide mechanisms for defining data security. Content providers are the standard interface that connects data in one process with code running in another process. Implementing a content provider has many advantages. Most importantly you can configure a content provider to allow other applications to securely access and modify your app data.
It is not that they are used only to share data with other applications. You may still use them because they provide a nice abstraction, but you don’t have to necessarily share data with other apps. This abstraction allows you to make modifications to your application data storage implementation without affecting other existing applications that rely on access to your data
You can get more info from the documentation.
ContentProvider is mainly used for access data from one application to another application.
For example by using ContentProvider we can get phone contacts,call log from phone to our own application in android.we can also access data which are stored in (sqlite)databases.
Well, as far as I kwnow a content provider is a database, and is used to pass data through apps.
But this data can be accessed only in the phone that it was saved? Or if I saved some data using the app with phone1, can I retrieve it using the app with phone 2?
If it can't do the second option, what could I use to do it?
Thanks.
Content provider is not a database. You can think this as a layer between your app and underlying data. The data can be in sqlite database, file or something else. Content provider is very useful to access and store your data to database or file. You need this when you use syncadapter or widgets in your app. Now to answer your question, content provider of your app can be accessed by a different app in your same phone provided you use correct permission. As I mentioned it's not a database, so answer of second question is not. I would recommend you to read about content provider on android developer site to get the basic concepts.
A content provider component supplies data from one application to others on request. Such requests are handled by the methods of the ContentResolver class. A content provider can use different ways to store its data and the data can be stored in a database, in files, or even over a network.
I am building an application that needs to keep an list of contacts. That list will be built by inserting data by the user directly or by selecting from Android contacts.
But my list of contacts must not be accessible from outside my application (and will be a password protected application).
I guess I can use a SQLite database and encrypt the data. But is it somehow possible to do it on top of the Android contacts provider?
I am targeting 2.2.
Quoting the first sentence of the Content Providers page of the dev guide:
Content providers store and retrieve data and make it accessible to all applications.
The providers are actually built with accessibility in mind, which is exactly the opposite of what you want. Databases, on the other hand, are accessible exclusively by the owner app. You could, in theory, create a content provider that only provides encrypted data, but I can't see the point in doing that. Your data would be less secure and you would not get any additional advantage over a database.